A good write-up by Ed Pilkington in the Guardian about a Texas execution. A very comprehensive investigation conducted by a Columbia law school professor and his students, to be published in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, suggests that Texas executed the wrong man.
It’s worth a read. Of course the likelihood that people have been executed in the US for crimes they did not commit is very high. Scores of people have been plucked from death row by new evidence unearthed by investigators trying to show that convictions and death sentences happen with alarming frequency in cases where the evidence is improperly investigated by the authorities.
There have been a number of cases around the world, in the UK certainly, where that has subsequently been admitted, and posthumous pardons have been issued, but in those countries there is no longer the need to maintain an argument in favor of capital punishment.
Here in the US that’s not the case. This new case from Columbia researchers may be the best evidence yet of the ultimate miscarriage of justice. I think it will have legs, though the opposition will be furious.
Let’s hope it’s a turning point. It’s way past time.
(h/t N. Fatale for the image)
In ancient China, death sentences were carried out immediately. But appeals were still heard (after the accused was dead). If the verdict was found to be unsound, the judge who delivered it was then banished to a malarial district, where his life expectancy was almost certainly not long.
Something along those lines might work until society at large comes round to the idea that lust for ultimate revenge is ultimately corrupting of the justice system in particular and the entire culture in general.
While, obviously, I agree, Squirrel (having, as usual, gone digging a little) is in a bit of a “rain on your parade” mode . . .
The Atlantic came up with a list, but I wish these cases often didn’t rely on a defence that seems to be primarily “some other guy could have done it” (especially when the “other guy” turns out to have been long dead) and stresses inadequate police investigations with hindsight.
(Or go all CSI on us and rant about “no DNA” as though it’s some kind of conclusive magic bullet when if DNA was not collected at the time from any suspects DNA on evidence from the crime scene’s irrelevant.)
One other mentioned in The Atlantic I followed up; if you look at newspaper reports that they link to, the case for a wrongful conviction looks fine. But if you look at the (long) pdf of a juridicial investigation, unfortunately it turns out in a footnote that the convicted man’s clothing (as well as shoes)carried bloodstains which DNA testing later actually showed to have been the victim’s blood.
Since the case for a wrongful conviction largely rested on the plaintiff having been somewhere else entirely at the time, the police not having properly compared blood samples, and possibly having planted a small amount of blood on a shoe, and otherwise rested on the “someone else” (by then dead and unable to sue!) hypothesis — which was actually investigated by the police at the time, because the person concerned had behaved in a rather odd way, but one which was probably explicable by reading too many detective stories or watching too many crime series on TV — that’s rather unfortunate.
However, it seems to be suggestive that if often the police failed to do a proper job, then equally so do both the prosecution (and especially) the defence. In that example, the defence appears to have spent a lot of time raising somewhat peripheral legal objections and as much simply sneering at (rather than refuting) all the prosecution witnesses.
Which may go some way to explaining why the jury reached a verdict on several charges within two hours. Which suggests to me that they didn’t really discuss anything much. Or that they’d made up their minds before the trial even started.
I’d be happier if some of these were possibly more proof of “unsafe convictions” than of innocence. Not that that alters the fact that if the person’s executed you can’t do anything much about either, of course. But it doesn’t improve the quality of the argument, I fear. But the proponents of capital ounishment, I imagine, are at least unlikely to go looking for the holes. . .Let’s hope none of them do.
“I’d be happier if some of these were not. . .” I think I should have written.
The death penalty was abolished in Illinois as the result of a perfect storm of incidents like this one (in which, fortunately, no one has been proven to actually have been executed). It became just enough of a non-partisan issue to pass simply because we had simultaneous proof of criminal misconduct by the Chicago police and DuPage County (think: “Orange County East”) prosecutors, and how often is that going to happen? Even with that, the Governor had to go through an endless show of meeting with (very vocal) families of victims who, more or less having selected themselves, were implacably hostile to the ban.
This won’t happen as serendipitously everywhere. Here, by the way, is The Official Texas Death Row Seal. It rewards a little bit of contemplation. And here is the official Texas Execution Primer, chalk full of fun facts to know and tell. Enjoy.
So much so I put it in the piece itself.
Good grief!
Happy to have been of service.
I’m trying to work out what kind of botany is going on in that seal. Looks like holly on one side, and holly has a rep for being poisonous, though it would be pretty hard to actually kill someone with holly, and on the other side it could be badly drawn sumac or a branch from a hemlock, but of course the hemlock that kills isn’t a tree at all and doesn’t look like that.
What an odd and terrible job to have, designing that thing. What an odd and terrible job the men (and probably women, too) have who work beneath it. ‘What is your daddy (mummy’s) job, sweetheart?’
‘Vengeance.’
‘Do you want to do that when you grow up?’
‘Even sooner.’
That seal is odd isn’t it. All that’s missing is a motto: “Superbus ad suppliciorum” perhaps?
prurigo occidere?
Took a quick check on the ACLU’s website to see if they’d jumped on the Mississippi case in the Bubba thread above. Nothing yet, but i did find this -
http://www.aclu.org/blog/capital-punishment/rhode-islands-rightful-stand-against-federal-government
It is long past time that the USA abolished capital punishment. The fact that it has evolved from an honestly brutal act such as hanging into a sanitized and near medical procedure makes it all the more obscene in my opinion.
However short of a constitutional amendment – or an act of judicial activism – it will have to wither state by state. Abolishing it at the federal level would be a start.
Abolishing it at the federal level would be a start.
Agree. However, going by my link, they don’t seem terribly disposed to do so. On the contrary, RI is prepared to imprison someone for life without parole, as the death penalty has been abolished here since 1852. The feds are attempting to override the state law by taking the prisoner into federal custody where he could face the death penalty.
However short of a constitutional amendment – or an act of judicial activism
What I never understood is if it can be defined as a ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ (and it was, wasn’t it?) once, how come it stopped being that? I can understand why a Supreme Court decision can be reactionary or illiberal once, because of the mores of the time — court decisions on slavery/black civil rights come to mind, obviously — but not how it can be acceptable the other way round.
(Sorry, Squirrel a bit befuddled at the moment, so that’s not as clear as usual, but I’m sure you get what I mean?)
Squirrel,
Capital punishment, per say, has never been ruled a cruel and unusual punishment by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Certain methods of execution have been ruled cruel and unusual, but not the fact of execution itself.
Keeping in mind that in 1789 the ‘normal’ methods of execution in the English common law world were still widespread and utterly barbaric, the court has always struggled with the notion of finding a way to label just about any of the modern (and in comparison rather gentle) ways of institutionally sanctioned ways of putting a body to death. They have done it, but they have had to jump through a few hoops when they did so.
The notion that execution in an of itself might be found to be cruel and unusual… no, they have never come close to saying that. Really would require an amendment to the to Constitution to make that the law.
That said, Congress could pass a law that removed the death penalty from some or all Federal crimes. But not in our lifetimes they won’t. Vengeance get votes.
Squirrel,
At the time the arguments were never about hanging. They were about drawing and quartering for capital crimes and, e.g., branding irons through the ears for petty theft* (so anyone could count the convictions and hang the thief after the third one).
They might also have been thinking (but not speaking) about witch burning and ducking (tie her up in a sack of cats, throw her in the river, and if she escapes, burn her as a witch). These practices were, if not popular, at least notable a mere century before in Massachusetts.
* The statute read, “grievously whipped and burned through the gristle of the right ear with an hot iron of the compass of an inch about.” The left ear was for the second offence, which left hanging for the third — after a bit more grievous whipping, of course.
Certain methods of execution have been ruled cruel and unusual, but not the fact of execution itself.
Oh. Didn’t realise that. One forgets (Squirrel says glumly) how very literal and tunnel-visioned lawyers can be, And thus how narrowly, from time to time the law can be interpreted instead of (as one would wish. expect, and hope) to broaden with the times.
So, a red hot poker up Edward II could be both ‘cruel and unusual’ but what has not yet become unusual is therefore nonetheless not cruel?
I wonder sometimes if many Americans realise that it comes from the English Bill of Rights of 1688? The difference, hopefully, being that the idea of what is both ‘cruel’ and ‘unusual’ progressed thereafter somewhat beyond the poker?
Thinking of ‘cruel and unusual’, somehow I missed this Herman Cain sequel to The Birds in the continuing saga of that peculiar child.
As if that wasn’t enough to give one doubts about the psyche of the American Right (we remember the assassination of the pet bunny rabbit all too vividly) we now have the cruel and unusual punishment of a watermelon.
Deadly black human-devouring chickens? Shot-up watermelons?
The semiotics of these images . . .Not exactly impenetrable, is it? Bloody hell.
Red – Breitbart was barking up the wrong tree in Vermont. As a librarian my wife hands out voter registration forms in our home town. The only thing stopping us from filling one out and voting is the knowledge that as Brits we shouldn’t. We are what counts as an immigrant minority in this whiter than white neck of the woods.
Voter fraud isn’t an issue in Vermont.
Voter fraud isn’t a issue anywhere, unless you count the GOP’s strategic purging of voter rolls in Florida and elsewhere. The cases of individuals casting votes they are not eligible to cast are statistically insignificant.
It’s all a false-flag campaign in support of making the ID requirements for voting more onerous and expensive of both time and money, thus more likely to inhibit voters in low-income/minority demographics.
Democrats, potentially.
Gunny,
Exactly.
My state passed an ID law recently. The New Republic had an interesting take on it. It’s not really going to affect Presidential or congressional elections much (it’s a Dem state either way, and Republicans weren’t involved much), but local elections.
What TNR leaves out is that it’s a pretty fair law – there is no charge for ID, and citizens are invited to register at welfare and senior centers, transportation provided for the elderly and folks who need it.
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/100429/rhode-island-voter-id-laws-hispanic
And this is a report of how the law worked out in the primaries -
http://www.boston.com/news/local/rhode_island/articles/2012/04/24/no_reports_of_problems_with_ris_new_voter_id_law/
Porn,
interestingly, the report about how it worked out also tends to prove that there was absolutely no need for the law in the first place.
Florida of course is a very different kind of place. There you have a long history of Republicans very aggressively -and often very successfully- attempting to stop poor black voters from getting into a polling booth.
Bluth -
No need for the law if you go by what’s on record. But as the lady said – I know what i know – and we do know what we know – it is corrupt as all get out here. But at any rate – no one seems to be terribly upset about the law, and most are pretty happy to show ID. It’s also most likely serving to register new voters who otherwise probably couldn’t be arsed. Provisional ballots can also be cast by those lacking proper ID at the polls. I think the law was sponsored by a black Democrat who had a councilwoman friend who had her vote stolen. I find a stolen vote to be far worse than being asked to show ID. Even if it’s statistically insignificant, it’s still a problem if you’re the one who had your vote stolen.
Porn,
Take your point. But anyone intent on stealing a vote could easily and cheaply knock up a fake id. Point is, all the serious voting fraud doesn’t happen at the retail level. It either happens in the counting (or not counting) or in the disenfranchising of whole blocks of voters by way of keeping them away from, or banned from, the polling booth altogether.
The great economist Archie Goodwin once observed that the science of bookkeeping has two main branches, addition and subtraction. If my job is to steal an election from you, I can do it by adding votes to my side’s tally or removing votes from yours. Over the years the first method has become increasingly difficult (though major breakthroughs may soon be upon us*). The main problem with it is that it leaves evidence behind, and this evidence is often well audited. It can still be done, but it’s both tricky and risky.
Where my voters are statistically indistinguishable from yours, suppressing your vote is similarly problematical. But when your voters form significant demographic clusters, I can target them much more effectively. If I’m at the top of my game, I can not only do it without leaving evidence of law breaking: I can do it without breaking any laws at all. If your people tend to be concentrated in certain locales, I can knock a few points off your total just by shortening polling hours everywhere, reducing the number of polling places in your strongholds and understaffing the polls in those places. I can also gerrymander precinct boundaries to make it relatively harder for your people to get to their polling places (or even to find them). All these things can be done and in fact have been done for at least a century and a half, but they require that I control the whole local election apparatus. There are locales where this is possible, of course, but there are also many more where it isn’t.
But some demographic clusters can be attacked much more expediently. The science of statistics has advanced enormously since the days of poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses. We no longer need anything nearly so crude. If I discover through statistical analysis that 10% of my voters and 30% of yours move every year, anything that makes it more difficult for the newly moved to vote greatly favors me. If I can reduce the turnout among the newly moved by 10%, I gain 2% overall – which, nationally, is simply insurmountable. By spreading the burden of re-registration equally among all transient voters, mine and yours, I escape the kind of publicity that says fraud to most people.
Such techniques – and never doubt that they are techniques – mirror longstanding efforts to increase the vote, such as “motor voter” laws and temporary residency for college students. A great many people view those projects as equally underhanded because they, too, tend to favor one party. To that I can only respond that yes, of course that’s why they’re instituted – but still, they work by increasing, not decreasing, the number of honest votes cast.
*We don’t seem to have reaped the benefits of computerized vote fraud yet, but the potential is great enough with the systems currently in use that it’s only a matter of time. Conspiracy theories about Diebold in particular abound. I don’t give them much credence, for the same reason I don’t buy conspiracy theories in general: way too many people would have to keep their mouths shut, which is the one thing that large numbers of people can be absolutely relied upon to not do. The risk flows directly from the simple fact that as systems go, these systems are trash, and their trashiness is an inevitable consequence of their wretched design. (See here, here, here and here.) This makes them highly prone to failure, and making fragile systems fail selectively is something we do know how to do. Doesn’t take many people to do it, either.
It is possible to make secure computer application systems, secure because they distribute very difficult to alter audit trails to several locations at once. But such systems cost a good deal more than fragile, hackable “point-of-vote” systems, and who the hell is going to pay for that? It’s not like there’s some compelling public interest, on the level, say, of Walgreen’s or CVS’s interest in keeping their prescription databases secure.
It’s rather easy to feel that your vote doesn’t really count, especially, say, if you tend vote Democratic in a heavily Democratic state. We vote i guess because we want to, and feel we do have a responsibility to, and good on all of us in the country, whatever party or none, that actually ponder and take our votes seriously.
About 2 decades ago i found myself moved to the Bay Area of Calif from the LA area, where i was registered. I sent in an absentee ballot, Uncle Bill was a stellar Dem candidate, and with Gore as a running mate sealed the deal for me. I hadn’t yet voted for a winning candidate in the years i had voted so far (first year i voted was for Carter the year that he lost. Cue Reagan basically gutting the high energy physics program i had just given up on).
Dianne Feinstein, (subsequently a superb senator) won in Calif by 10,000 votes in absentee ballots. First time i felt that, even in a huge Dem state like Calif., that my insignificant little vote really counted. Don’t fuck with my vote.
Coincidentally (or nor), i picked up the alternative paper at the packy tonight, and the cover story was about the voter ID law and how it passed. Gives a bit of insight as to how the voter fraud seems to operate here.
http://providence.thephoenix.com/news/138781-who-passed-voter-id
A few threads we were talking about cheap bastards – i outed myself as one but i most certainly do tip well. A few nights ago i got a shitty tip along with a union buck, and that it was just to let us know that “unions buy local” and please make sure to tell my (unbeknownst to them, 24-hr a day Fox news watching) boss. They really don’t help their cause much. Gee thanks for not driving all the way up to New Hampshire to go out to eat. Along with your asshole buddies who fucked off to Florida to spend their union bucks while we’re stuck with the tax tab. Get bent.
Porn,
I’m curious. What’s a ‘packy’?
Sorry, wonders of google and all. A package store. I remember those. But there is a sentence that could go down very differently over here. Where many of the corner newsagents are owned and run by people from Pakistan. Which, if you were a skinhead neonazi, you would refer to as ‘paki shops’. Trying now to think of a similarly innocent Brit expression that could end in as many tears if someone used it over there….
Bluth -
It was a mystery to me when we first moved up here too, in Jersey we just called it a liquor store. Now i forget that it’s still a mystery in other parts of the country. A grinder was a mystery too, we called them hoagies.
Bluthner:
Smoke a fag?
Di -
Ha!
I believe “fanny” means something different over there too. “Get off my tit” is one that cracks me up, especially coming from a guy.
“Can I borrow your rubber?”
One foot in the stirrup on the way to Santa Fe today. Catch you guys when we get back. Fresh snow up high this morning, so the passes might be challenging.
hasta pronto.
What’s a rubber in the UK?
Porn,
An eraser.
Though from Frothy’s point of view, a condom could be seen as a ‘baby earser’, too, guess.
Squirrel -
I just had a look at your links. I can’t really speak for the Vermont one, i don’t know what goes on up there. The Gary Johnson ad is unfortunate, but he is no Ron Paul racist. He’s more a proper libertarian than the pseudo Ron Paul type. I might not agree with him on everything (i don’t), but the guy is not batshit. A very sane, reasonable and legit guy.
http://www.garyjohnson2012.com/issues
Or as an STD eraser, by the sane.
Bluth,
When I started high school in France, they put all the foreigners in one class for a month or so until we were marginally ready to be assimilated. Right away, one of the English girls at asked the Brooklyn kid in front of me if she could borrow a rubber, and some of us (especially me) got all smug at his astonished (but intensely hopeful) double take. A couple of days later another one suggested that I come around and knock her up sometime, and then it was everybody else’s turn.
I got caught out by the ‘fag’ once’ at a party where a guy brought his American boyfriend, who was a ballet dance. (And ex-baseball player; he threw a stone into the lake from further away than I imagined possible). But, knowing his boyfriend smoked, and having seen him smoking, I asked him, offering up my pack of Dunhill Internationals — I was a better off Squirrel then! — at one point if he’d “like a fag” and got a very old-fashioned look.
The worst though was a visiting Australian girl, who asked me (after dinner with several of my friends around) if I had “any Durex”. Somehow nobody actually obviously looked at each other (except for my Italian girlfriend who looked a bit startled, to say the least, and I had that feeling there might be trouble brewing later) but the conversation got a bit louder as I took her into my bedroom for a packet . . .(Wondering what on earth she wanted any for, but still . . )
Being a cheap bastard, i got in the habit of smoking rollups in the UK, (with separately bought menthol filters, even). And being a cheap bastard, i wanted to continue the habit when i got back home to the US. Went to the drugstore (chemist, i suppose for our overseas friends. Chemist here is basically your friendly neighborhood meth lab now i guess.) when i got back to the US for some rolling papers as i was out. The guy looked at me and said, come on, you’re too old for that now.
Then there was my college friend from Alaska, a good looking but intensely shy and thoroughly Anglophone fellow named Lisle Hebert. One summer he met a dazzling (his word) French girl in some US city, who seemed intrigued by his French name, and also seemed to think that deep down he really could speak French but had momentarily forgotten how. They were both tourists at loose ends, and they decided to take in the zoo. He was charmed but never figured it would go beyond a pleasant walk and some converversation. Imagine his surprise when, standing in front the rocky pool where the seals and walruses were cavorting, she turned to him and said, “Do you like, how you say, the phoque?”
Many years ago and working with a multi national group of subcontract draftsmen a very precise German was asked by a Brit:
“Can I use your eraser?”
To which he replied with a smile:
“I don’t know. Can you?”
Expat,
My mother started using that line on me when I was maybe five, and didn’t stop till I moved out. What she never thought to even try explaining was why I’d want to grow up not talking like my friends, which to me was always the howlingly obvious question.
I don’t know if anyone read my link from the Phoenix on voter fraud. I read it twice, and they leave a very big hole in there.
The Feds investigated the case of the state rep who had her vote stolen – apparently someone had approached an illegal immigrant and offered him a passport – his “handlers” advised him to use her name to grease the skids, and to recruit other voter impersonators.
What the article doesn’t say is who the”handlers” are – ie who would be behind mass voter fraud in a Democratic state with a negligible Republican influence. It’s basically Dem vs Dem here, not Dem vs R. If anyone reads it and can see something between the lines in there that i missed, let me know.
And for that matter, cui bono?
Pornstar:
Cultural differences . . .for years now, if you go into a newsagent’s (chemists –drugstores — sell ciggie papers in the USA???) you’re asked if you want the “small” ones . . .as opposed to the “king size”. (Squirrel has smoked rollups for years now. Like lots of people. I sometimes think it’s only kids and bankers who buy packets; presumably, in the case of some teenagers, those who haven’t fully mastered the hand-rolling technique yet.) Once it was only prisoners, ex-prisoners, and down-and-outs. . .
Pornstar (the voter fraud thingy)
Yes, I did; general local factional political dodginess/rivalry/vendetta (even?) I sort of suspected. (I have begun, belatedly and rather slowly, I dare say) to grasp that local/individual politics, even when ‘local’ is ‘state’, trumps party affiliation over there.
(Remember ‘Chief Wiley’ on CiFA? I always had terrible trouble understanding how he could claim be a Democrat.)